Lottery analysis

How much you win if you win depends on how many winners there are. The lottery buys US government bonds to cover the annual annuity payments. The lottery has two kinds of prizes. If you are aware of a percentage being out of date, please contact us to let us know, and we will update it.

What an economist would call the present value of the annuity is much less than its advertised value, because if you had that much in cash and invested it say in US government bonds like the lottery does so there is low riskyou would get a lot more back in equal annual payments over 29 years.

When the jackpot is huge and the number of tickets sold is a sizable fraction of Instead, you are looking at the taxes that would be withheld if the jackpot were won today. If you win the jackpot, consult a good accountant and tax attorney for ways to minimize your tax liability.

The jackpot is divided equally among the winning tickets. You can take your winnings immediately in one lump payment, or you can take your winnings in 30 equal annual payments spread out over 29 years. As we said above, your expected winnings for those are about Important Notes The jackpot numbers are estimates rounded to the nearest million dollars.

So we need to calculate the probability distribution of the number of winners. The advertised value of the annuity option is usually almost twice the size of the cash option because of the interest that builds up over 29 years. If you win, you may have to divide the jackpot with other winners.

If the tax rates for a state have changed since that drawing date, the report is not an accurate snapshot of the taxes that would have been withheld on that date in history.

The other half goes to overhead administration and advertising and to the state governments.

Please only contact us about lottery withholding rates, not the state income tax or sales tax rate. Thus the first thing we have to figure out is the number of tickets sold. As the size of the jackpot increases, so does the expected number of winners. Of the 50 cents of each dollar that goes to prizes, The following table gives the relevant numbers.

The states modify their tax withholding rates from time to time, and this chart is accurate as to our latest information we could track down. Please verify all information with your local government tax agency. The specific analysis is for the drawing Wednesday, February 15, because that was when one of us was called by a newspaper reporter and we updated this web page.

If you are viewing the Jackpot Analysis for a past drawing date, keep in mind you are viewing the application of the current tax rates against past jackpot amounts. All of the tax amounts listed above are the taxes withheld at the time of the prize award, not your exact final tax burden.

Even for very large jackpots, the expected value of a ticket is still less than the price of the ticket. Your chance of winning the jackpot with one ticket is about 1 in To keep things simple, we will consider that the present value of the jackpot is the value of the cash option.

When the jackpot is small and the number of tickets sold is much smaller than The number of winners in a lottery has an approximate Poisson distribution, and the expected number of winners is the number of tickets sold divided by the number of ways to win (approximately million for the Powerball Lottery).

As the size of the jackpot increases, so does the expected number. Mega Millions lottery jackpot analysis shows the amount a grand prize winner would actually get after federal and state taxes are withheld from the prize money.

The narrator of "The Lottery" is super detached from the story. Rather than telling us the characters' thoughts or feelings, the narrator simply shows the process of the lottery.

Tennessee (TN) lottery results (winning numbers) and prize payouts for Cash 3, Cash 4, Cash4Life, Tennessee Cash, Powerball, Mega Millions, Lotto America. When Shirley Jackson's chilling story "The Lottery" was first published in in the The New Yorker, readers were disgusted, curious, and bewildered.

Hit Frequency and Rank Analysis: Game to by analyzed: Powerball (Multi-State) First draw in database WED 06/25/97 Last draw in database SAT 09/08/18 PP: 3.